All the Good Ones Are Gay
by peroxidepest17
Summary: Something gets lost in the translation. Or maybe not.


**Title:** All the Good Ones are Gay (And Some of the Bad Ones Are Too)  
**Universe:** Reborn (not quite TYL)  
**Theme/Topic:** N/A  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Character/Pairing/s:** I-pin, Lambo (speculative RebornxLambo and blink-and-you'll-miss-it mentions of Tsuna and YamamotoxGokudera)  
**Warnings/Spoilers:** none I can think of, directly. Probably some OOC because I don't remember if TYL I-pin had a personality or not. Also crack. But this is me, writing Reborn. You knew it was there.  
**Word Count:** 1,985  
**Summary:** Something gets lost in the translation. Or maybe not.  
**Dedication:** for juin's thank you fic for donating to my cause!**  
A/N:** This is short and kind of dumb. You all know me well enough by now to not expect much else right. I don't remember if I-pin and Lambo are actually the same age. But they're totally the same mental level and if I-pin younger she's totally Chinese so she probably skipped like three grades based on her math tests alone or something stereotypical like that. IDK.  
**Disclaimer:** No harm is meant by this!

* * *

Lambo is pretty popular at school, I-pin has noticed. The girls all like the fact that he's foreign mostly, but Tsuna-san says his popularity is probably bolstered by the fact that he's got this dreamy, distant sort of look on his face all the time. Like an idol.

But more than anything, I-pin is fairly certain that the thing the girls like best about Lambo is how Lambo doesn't really care to give any of them the time of day.

Girls are stupid like that, I-pin thinks. She feels it would do them all a service if they stopped wasting thoughts on stupid Lambo and worked towards training their minds and bodies to be stronger and less prone to ridiculous whims.

"I-pin-chan, what kind of girls does Lambo-kun like?" some of their classmates ask her during lunch one afternoon, when I-pin is busy trying to figure out if her hair still smells like ramen even though she washed it _twice_ last night in an effort to get the pork smell out after work. There's one fat kid in her phys ed. class who always takes a big whiff of the air whenever she walks by and she wonders if it's because she smells like dinner. She does not want to be eaten—or worse, have to beat up some hapless classmate for thinking she is dinner— even though the other girls assure her that that boy is not smelling her out of any desire to use her for food.

But he is very, very fat, and I-pin thinks the other girls are wrong. They like Lambo, so they can't be that smart.

I-pin blinks at them when she hears their question. "Lambo and girls?" she asks in response, and tilts her head curiously, braid still scrunched absently in her hands.

Her classmates giggle at her then, like they find it really funny that she might not know a Japanese word as simple as that but for some mysterious reason, seems to know the meanings to a whole bunch of violent-sounding Italian phrases.

I-pin frowns. "Lambo doesn't like girls," she says after a beat, as simply as she can.

Her classmates stare. "What?"

"Lambo doesn't like girls," I-pin answers again, and wonders, vaguely, if she'd stuttered. She releases her hair and searches her slightly-less-than middle-school vocabulary for words that will express the deep psychological scarring Lambo received at the age of five from the mysterious and evil "Shi-Shi-Ba-Ba," who was apparently a Japanese girl that wore a uniform almost identical to the ones they are all wearing right now, actually.

Also, Lambo is kind of preoccupied with killing Reborn-san—or something—and has been since I-pin has known him.

But I-pin soon discovers that she does not in fact know the exact Japanese words to describe "deep psychological scarring" or how to say "preoccupied with killing" yet, and sighs instead. "He's scared of girls and has no time for anything besides work," she explains eventually, which she supposes is close enough.

The girls all share a startled look. And then squeal. "That's so cool!" they shriek.

I-pin frowns and goes back to smelling her hair, while across the room, a cute second-year girl tries to get Lambo's attention by asking him what he's doing this weekend.

"Work," Lambo answers, while he stares out the window with a grim and dramatic sort of purpose, and I-pin supposes he is coming up with yet another plan to assassinate Reborn-san that will inevitably blow up in his face. I-pin wonders if she should tell the girls that if Lambo had to choose between going on dates with classmates or engineering the dramatic and messy death of a world famous Mafioso, the girls wouldn't really stand a chance.

I-pin realizes that she doesn't know the Japanese word for "engineering" either. She sighs again and gives up. How troublesome.

In the meantime, the other girls whisper excitedly amongst themselves at the sight of Lambo ignoring their second-year senpai and seem to find both the notions of his fear of women and his dedication to his job equally adorable and worthy of praise, for some inexplicable reason.

I-pin gives up on making sense of Japan and decides that while she is fairly certain she doesn't still smell like pork, she doesn't want to risk it all the same. She borrows some perfume from one of the others and squirts it around herself just in case.

The fat kid ends up sniffing her again during PE anyway, and it makes her wonder if fat people have a particularly highly developed sense of smell in this country or something.

* * *

The next day, Lambo comes to school sporting a sulky sort of frown and several bandages and a cut bottom lip. His hair is tousled from an explosion.

The girls find it horribly _romantic_, ask him what happened, and earn themselves one of those dreamy Lambo-sighs from under hooded eyes. "Work," he explains calmly (though I-pin knows he's really just holding in the tears) and goes to his desk with a hand in one pocket and his schoolbag clutched dramatically over his shoulder with the other.

More squealing erupts after that and I-pin ignores it, absently spraying herself with this magical aerosol scent-neutralizer that Giannini came up with (guaranteed to block out all smells, he'd said, by incapacitating the scent receptors in the nasal cavity). Then she says a quick Buddhist prayer for serenity under her breath as they prepare for first period Japanese literature, which she finds as obtuse and confusing as her classmates.

Lambo murmurs something mournful about his eternal rival Reborn-san in the meantime and languishes in his chair by the window.

I-pin takes her seat nearby and asks him if she smells like pork.

He gives her a cursory sniff and then tells her she smells like cold, which doesn't make any sense to her at all.

But as long as it's not pork that's fine; she takes out her reading glasses, pulls out her homework, and asks him if his butt still hurts from his session with Reborn-san last night.

Lambo is used to her strange way of phrasing things by now so he just shrugs one shoulder noncommittally and says, "Next time I'll come out on top. For now I just have to…bear with it."

He rubs at his abused rump absently.

In the periphery, I-pin notices it when the girls suddenly stop squealing and go absolutely still. It's a lot like herbivores in a forest, when they feel like a hunter is coming.

One of the girls sitting behind Lambo's desk—Haruko-chan, I-pin thinks— suddenly drops her pencil on accident, disturbing the perfect, strange quiet. It rolls across the floor, stopping at the toe of Lambo's shoe. It is bright pink, and has a little bell-charm on the end in the shape of a smiling cloud with a little yellow lightning bolt sticking out of its side. I-pin doesn't understand why Japanese girls have so many things with bells on them. Or why there seems to be a need to anthropomorphize everything in this country, even storm clouds.

But Lambo just picks the pencil up, examines it for a moment, and smiles a little before handing it back to Haruko-chan. "That's cute," he says to the gaping girl absently, before turning back to the window without another word.

Silence.

"Oh my god," the girl breathes after a beat, and looks over at I-pin like someone has uppercut her in the chin and rattled her brain inside of her skull, thus rendering proper motor coordination impossible.

The rest of the girls in class seem equally punched-out and wide-eyed; it's the same kind of face I-pin remembers Tsuna-san making after he'd found Gokudera-kun and Yamamoto-kun in the middle of that strange wrestling match in Tsuna-san's hallway closet.

I-pin blinks and adjusts her glasses. She thinks that even though she's lived here for quite a while now, Japan will always be a strange and foreign land to her.

* * *

"It happens with European guys all the time!" I-pin hears later at lunch, when Chiyo-san storms up to them looking wide-eyed and a little wild. "My neechan told me a story about some guy who used to go here who was half-Italian or something! And then he totally had a thing with," she pauses here to lower her voice into a scandalized whisper, "_another guy_."

The girls start to chatter all at the same time then, and I-pin is confused because she's not exactly sure what anyone means when they say "a thing." That whole term seems kind of vague, and is the number one most annoying thing to hear a customer ask for at the ramen shop.

"Is that what you meant yesterday, I-pin-chan?" they say to her after a moment, when they catch her warily smelling the end of her braid again.

"Excuse me?" she asks, politely.

"When you said Lambo-kun is afraid of girls."

"I meant that Lambo is afraid of girls when I said that," she clarifies again, and feels slightly lost.

The other girls sigh, like inexplicably, between one person saying the same sentence and the next, the meaning has completely changed somehow.

"I knew he was way too cool to be true," Chiyo-san sulks.

"And I mean, look at the way he wears _pants_."

"And the hair. There's something about the hair."

"I knew all that window gazing was kind of homo!"

They frown and look dreamy all at once. I-pin wonders why the fat kid from PE never just tries to eat one of them; they don't look very alert and it feels like it would be easy to catch them.

After a moment, Haruko-chan, the one with the smiling cloud pencil, stands abruptly, looking haunted. "And who is this Reborn-san he keeps talking about anyway?"

Everyone looks to I-pin for answers, because Lambo is staring out the window again (and apparently that is homo or something, though I-pin has no idea what that means).

"Well?" they press.

I-pin shrugs. "Reborn-san is a great and powerful man," she answers, because again, she has no idea what the words for "professional Mafia hitman and deadly assassin," are in Japanese. She figures she's close enough.

The girls sigh again, brows furrowed, sounding kind of hopeful.

"At least it's a nice image," they acquiesce, after a moment. "I wonder if Reborn-san is foreign too."

"Yes," I-pin answers. "He is an Italian."

They squeal some more.

Again, I-pin has no idea what they're talking about. Instead she takes a portion of Chashu from her lunch and wraps it in a napkin. Her plan today is to take it to PE with her and throw it on the ground when the fat kid tries to eat her. She hopes the offer of easier prey will distract him long enough for her to get away from him without having to actually harm him first.

"You know," she will say to him as politely as she can that afternoon, while he is staring at the balled-up napkin full of fatty pork at his feet questioningly and she is halfway across the field, "if you didn't think about food so often, perhaps you wouldn't be so fat. Please stop trying to eat me."

He'll start crying and run away, and she'll have no idea why.

Lambo will sigh at her after that and tell her not to pick on those weaker than her and that she should be more like him.

Haruko-chan and Chiyo-san will both declare, "That sensitivity is so homo!" with big, starry eyes afterwards, and I-pin will miss China just a little bit (but not enough to actually go back, because while people in Japan are confusing, people in China are downright terrifying).

Then I-pin will return to Tsuna-san's house and inform Giannini that his aerosol spray is defective.

Lambo will continue to stare out windows and think only of Reborn.

**END**


End file.
